Workflow Help - Proxy / Original / Optimized

Good evening all,

I hope everyone is well. New member here just trying to get a little clarity on some contrasting opinions/directions.

I have not been editing long. I currently edit from a Macbook Pro 13in and also an iMac Pro base model. I am editing from a 1TB T£ SSD and have been importing all media (good or junk) into the library and clicking optimize media.

I have a few questions that I would love some experienced heads to answer:

By having background render on and importing all media (with optimized checked) and I just wasting time letting the machine transcode it all at the start? If I only use 10% of it?

Could I for example just create proxy files (when editing on the MBP) and then when my final edit is done, switch to the original media and transcode just the project file to the optimized media? I hope I am making sense!

Last question. Is there any point using optimized media at all? Is there a real benefit when grading? I read that ProRes holds up better when making adjustments than original media? The most I do generally is a colour match and then a LUT or manual grade on top. Or one additional to match contrast and brightness etc.

Sorry for the long first post guys and thank you very much in advance for any help offered.

Chris

1- Yes, you are wasting time and drive space. Leave background rendering off, never optimzie unless you can explain exacly why you're doing that (otherwise, chances are you don't need to).

2- Yes, you could use proxies and then switch to original media on your iMac Pro.

3- There are rare situations where you'd use Optimzied media. Most modern Macs will handle H.264 just fine (the most common codec of cameras now). ProRes technically can hold up fine, but for most editing tasks, the effects most folks use, it doesn't matter. For what you're doing, you don't need ProRes.

4- Welcome to the forums!

Ok thank you very much for this. This has cleared things up once and for all.
It'll be the last time I import with optimised media selected.

Thanks very much for your help on this!

ShootingStills wrote: ... Is there any point using optimized media at all? Is there a real benefit when grading? I read that ProRes holds up better when making adjustments than original media?...

The main reason for using optimized media is improved editing performance. There is no difference when color grading, because FCPX by default uses ProRes 422 render files - even if the timeline contains only H264 files. So in a sense FCPX is always using optimized media, even if you don't generate that. The ingested media files (whether H264, ProRes, etc) are never written to. The only writes take place to render files and the exported output file.

IF you are collaboratively working with other people (e.g. a colorist), THEN it could be useful to *export* a ProRes file, and this could help grading.

If your camera codec is 10-bits per color channel or higher, THEN it could help to export ProRes before uploading that. This is because H264 is generally only 8 bits, so exporting a graded 10-bit timeline to 8-bit H264 output could produce banding or other artifacts. This is more common if the original camera profile was flat or log and the scene contains gradients.

ProRes is generally about 6x the size of similar resolution H264 and requires about 6x the I/O bandwidth, so that is a consideration. Proxies are about 70% the size of H264 originals, so give the performance advantage of optimized full-res ProRes without the size or I/O penalty. However if you intermix 1080p and 4k material in proxy mode, the 1080p content (in proxy) is only 960x540 in the FCPX viewer, so this might be too low for some editing decisions. You cannot have some files as proxy and others not - it's an all-or-nothing mode. In that case using optimized media might be better.